Parliamentary Elections, 3 May 2025

Australia held federal elections on 3 May 2025 for both chambers of parliament, the Senate (76 seats) and the House of Representatives (150 seats). Australia uses a preferential voting system and has federal elections every three years (AI Australia n.d.). Candidates for the lower house must win an absolute majority, if necessary, by successively reallocating second preference votes. The vote for the Senate is proportional, meaning that a candidate must receive a certain proportion of the vote or quota (per state or territory) to be voted in to office. Australia has compulsory voting with a AUD $20 fine (approximately USD $13.5) for not voting (AI Australia n.d.).

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is headed by one electoral Commissioner with a Deputy Head Commissioner as their second. The commission then breaks down into various sectors covering areas such as delivery, electoral integrity and operations, regulations, logistics and technology (AEC n.d.a).

Historically, Australia has provided various methods to achieve accessible voting and has frequently used special voting arrangements (SVA). This election was no different with the AEC providing phone voting, physically accessible polling stations, mobile voting stations and postal voting (AEC 2025a). 

Many voters and residents of Chinese descent use apps like WeChat and RedNote for their news (Yang et al. 2025; Hui 2025); electoral news on these apps was found to misrepresent campaign speeches, among other acts of disinformation targeting issues relevant to migrants such as undocumented immigration, investor visas and changes to Australia’s diplomatic relations with countries like the US and India. For example, one claim refused by the government was that  12,500 Indian nationals had been naturalized (Yang et al. 2025). An AI deepfake video was made of opposition leader Peter Dutton, purporting to show him speaking Mandarin Chinese and making campaign pledges to Chinese Australians (Hui 2025). 

There were no such major problems on election day. However, in New South Wales in the division of Barton, nearly 2,000 ballots were indeed missing and later found in an election worker’s home. The loss and recovery of the ballots did not affect the vote since they had already been counted, and the boxes with the ballot had been sealed and not tampered with when found (Carpenter and Lackey). The election worker was transporting the ballots from the polling booth to the counting centre for a mandatory recount when they noticed that seven boxes left the polling booth and only six arrived at the counting centre. It was deemed the mishap was not deliberate but the AEC launched an investigation into the incident and the adequacy of safeguards against a recurrence in future (Carpenter and Lackey; Taylor 2025). 

The voter turnout rate was 90.67 per cent (International IDEA, n.d.).

Two parties dominated the elections with the incumbent Labor Party gaining seats and the Liberal/National Coalition losing seats in the House of Representatives—going from 73 seats to 93 seats, and from 58 seats to 43 seats respectively (AEC 2025c). The Labor Party’s win effectively secures a second term for its leader, the current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 

Innovation

To educate against the spread of mis- and disinformation the AEC ran a programme called ‘Stop and Consider’ (AEC n.d.b) as well as Disinformation Register for the 2025 federal elections (AEC 2025b). In a widely shared Facebook post claimed that six million ballots went missing and were not counted in the election; the Disinformation Register indicated the apparent source of the error and rebutted it with the actual turnout figure for ballots successfully cast (AEC n.d.c).